Students in VTSS find there are actually jobs for them out there

STANFORD -- Twenty years ago, Patrick Windham, then a student at Stanford,
learned to analyze how science and technology interact with society. Today,
he is writing federal legislation on technology and science policies.

Windham, a leading staff member of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on
Science, Technology and Space, helped set up the Stanford interdisciplinary
program Values, Technology, Science and Society in 1971, and was the first
student to graduate from it in 1973.

"There are many important jobs on the boundary of science and technology
on the one hand, and business, government and society on the other hand,"
Windham said in a recent speech to the 15 graduating students and their
relatives at the 20th graduation ceremony of the program.

"Our first graduate is applying exactly the mixture of disciplines to
science and technology policy that we hoped would be useful when we set up
this program," said Walter Vincenti, Stanford professor emeritus of
aeronautical engineering, who is one of the founders and currently chairman
of the program.

An undergraduate program offering a bachelor of arts, bachelor of science
and an honors degree, Values, Technology, Science and Society investigates
how science and technology have influenced human society throughout history
and how societies have, in turn, shaped science and technology. It also
teaches students to examine ethical issues that arise in the practice of
engineering and science.

How long is it appropriate to extend life support to comatose patients?
How should new manufacturing equipment be designed to balance skilled, safe
jobs with high productivity? How "private" are electronic-mail messages? Does
the right to privacy warrant banning robotic dialing machines that call
people to generate sales? Are computer files covered under the Freedom of
Information Act? How can we ethically test a future AIDS vaccine in humans?

To help think through the political, economic and ethical implications of
such questions, the world needs more programs like VTSS, Windham said. This
fall, the VTSS program will change its name to STS (for Science, Technology
and Society). Cornell and MIT have elevated their STS programs to
departmental status, and with researchers in Europe, Canada and Australia,
"STS is gradually evolving into an identifiable international community of
scholars," Vincenti said.

Such programs teach students to analyze these predicaments from various
points of view and explain to people the benefits and risks of new
technologies, Windham said.

"Whatever job you will take, the problems are complex and the choices
bewildering, and you must understand technology to avoid slipping into
simplistic positions," he said.

While technological advances have changed society profoundly, society also
shapes technology, said Robert McGinn, a professor in the industrial
engineering department and associate chairman of the Stanford program. Not
everything that is technically possible gets accepted without qualification,
and once-accepted technologies can fall out of favor for economic,
environmental or safety reasons, he said.

For example, Sweden will decommission all its nuclear power plants by the
year 2005, Germany has placed rigorous limits on genetic engineering, and the
U.S. Congress in 1971 voted to cease further funding for the development of a
commercial supersonic airplane.

Though placing selective limits on individual technological possibilities
may become more important in today's populous societies as more is learned
about their effects, McGinn said that historically some societies have
already done so, usually in an all-or-nothing fashion.

For example, in the 16th century, the Spanish and Portuguese introduced
the musket into a Japanese society that used elaborate metal processing
techniques to manufacture swords. The gun spread so quickly that Japan soon
became an arms exporter.

Its fortune changed, however, when lowly, musket-wielding peasants started
shooting aristocratic samurai warriors armed with swords. Fearing that the
peasants were undermining their social status, the samurai prevailed on the
shogun to phase out production of guns.

In 1855, a year after Commodore Perry "opened" Japan, a U.S. Navy
commander made fun of the Japanese, taking their "ignorance of firearms" as a
sign of "primitive innocence and Arcadian simplicity." In fact, the Japanese
had deliberately given up the guns to preserve their hierarchical social
structure and the spiritual value of the sword.

"The interplay of technologies and societies is certainly different, but
even more important today," McGinn said. "We are educating our students to be
sensitive analysts of that critical relationship. Patrick Windham is an
excellent example for them to emulate."

Though the program does not train students for specific positions, most of
its graduates continue on to law, education, medical, public policy or
business school; some enter public service.

The program moved into the School of Engineering last fall, after having
been an inter-school program reporting to the provost's office for many
years. To guide that transition, Vincenti, who had retired in 1983, agreed to
head the program for the third time.

"I will shepherd the program into the School of Engineering, since by now
I know people and my way around there," said Vincenti, who graduated from
Stanford in 1938 and returned as a professor in 1957.

McGinn believes that moving into the School of Engineering offers new
opportunities for valuable research and teaching about science and technology
in society. He expects that his work on ethical issues in engineering will
benefit from interaction with his engineering colleagues.

"At this point, historical and ethical studies of engineering in society
remains an underdeveloped area of scholarship," he said. "We hope to change
that."

Though the program started as what Vincenti called a "grass-roots"
operation and lived a hand-to-mouth existence, early financial constraints
may even have helped. Keeping a low profile and attracting professors who
were motivated only by their intellectual interest rather than by new funds,
Values, Technology, Science and Society gradually earned respect as
intellectually stimulating for faculty and academically demanding for
students.

"Faculty involved in the program have made significant contributions to
the study of science and technology in society from various disciplines. We
introduce some of that research in our core courses, exposing students to
state-of-the-art scholarship," McGinn said.

Program faculty come from the Schools of Law and Engineering, and the
Departments of English, History, Computer Science, Anthropology and
Economics.

While being housed in the School of Engineering will put VTSS on stable
administrative footing, Vincenti insists that the program must stay truly
interdisciplinary and involve teachers and students from other schools.

"We are in engineering, not of engineering," he said.

Because they are powerful driving forces for change in historic and
contemporary societies, Vincenti said, courses teaching the history of
Western culture should include more study of technology and science.

"Some of these courses are trying to play Hamlet without the prince, so we
decided to put the prince in," he said.

Weaving together knowledge about technological advances and about their
interactions with society is hard work if one goes beyond just offering an
umbrella under which everyone teaches his or her field, he said. Vincenti and
other faculty in the program have worked closely together for years, learning
each other's vocabularies and ideas to create an interdisciplinary
curriculum.

"You can sit in the faculty club and talk across your disciplinary
boundaries until the cows come home, but you don't really come down to cases
until you try to teach a course together," he said. "That drives you to a
depth of discussion not found in casual conversation."

The participants' motto was "making a compound, not a mixture," and they
could offer courses representing such compounds only because they had made
the new compound in themselves.

"Though hard work, it was a wonderful intellectual exercise for us that I
would not trade for anything," Vincenti said.

That collaboration also has spun off scholarly books that are recognized
and used by researchers in other disciplines, such as Vincenti's What
Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical
History, the first book that approaches the history of engineering not as a
history of things, but of ideas.

Another example is the technological history of the piano Giraffes, Black
Dragons and Other Pianos by Edwin Good, a professor emeritus of religious
studies, who also is a concert pianist. He became interested in the piano as
a machine while teaching in Values, Technology, Science and Society.

Robert McGinn has written Science, Technology and Society, one of the most
widely used texts in the field. Nathan Rosenberg, professor of economics and
Vincenti collaborated in writing The Britannia Bridge, a study of the
generation and diffusion of the knowledge embodied in the first tubular,
wrought-iron bridge.

Jim Adams, professor of mechanical engineering and a former chairman of
the program, has written Flying Buttresses, Entropy and O- Rings, a work that
vividly describes the worklife and activities of the professional engineer.

-gs-

This story was written by Gabrielle Strobel, a science writing intern at
the Stanford News Service.

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